Since the mid 1960s a number of affluent white schools, both public and private, have made efforts to include low-income students of color in their student bodies. Data on the attainment, professional status, and income of these students do not address the ambivalence many experience in white middle-class institutions. Those who have examined the feelings of these students have usually been white, middle-class academics themselves. The author, who conducted a study of the educational experiences of disadvantaged young men attending Catholic high schools on scholarship, asserts that white researchers who want to understand the experiences of students of color must begin by examining whiteness and the developmental dynamics of white racial identity. Stages of racial identity development for whites outlined by Helms (1991) and Tatum (1992) are explored, and the implications for white educators are traced. Educators must make efforts to move white students beyond the contact stage of little or no experience of color to the "disintegration" stage at which whites begin to acknowledge racism in a rudimentary way and beyond to later stages in understanding racism to the extent possible. (Contains 53 references.) (SLD)